From csmonitor.com: How should a society treat its youngest criminal offenders? And the families of victims of those offenders?

Half
a dozen states are now weighing these questions anew, as they consider
whether to ban life sentences for juveniles that don't include a option
for parole – and whether those now serving such sentences should have a
retroactive shot at parole.

Here in Illinois, proposed legislation would give 103 people – most convicted of unusually brutal crimes – a chance at parole
hearings, while outlawing the sentence for future young perpetrators.

The
proposal has victims' families up in arms, angry that killers they had
been told were in prison for life might be given a shot at release and
that they'd need to regularly attend hearings in the future, reliving
old traumas, to try to ensure that these criminals remain behind bars.

Advocates of legislation, meanwhile, both in
Illinois and elsewhere, note that the US is the only country in the
world with anyone – nearly 2,400 across the nation – serving such a
severe sentence for a crime committed as a juvenile. They criticize the
fact that the sentence is often mandatory, part of a system devoid of
leniency for a teenager's lack of judgment, or hope that youth can be
reformed.

"Kids should be punished, and held accountable.
The crimes we're talking about are very serious crimes," says Alison
Parker, deputy director of the US program of Human Rights Watch and
author of a report on the issue. "But children are uniquely able to
rehabilitate themselves, to grow up and to change. A
life-without-parole sentence says they're beyond repair, beyond hope."

The sentence is automatic for certain crimes in
more than half of all states, part of a wave of "get tough" laws aimed
at cracking down on rising crime rates during the 1980s and '90s. Which
means judges often have little to no discretion when they mete out
punishment. In many instances, they are prohibited from considering age
or even whether the juvenile was the one who pulled the trigger. About
a quarter of the juveniles serving life without parole sentences
nationally were convicted of what is known as "felony murder," says Ms.
Parker. They participated in a felony in which murder was committed,
but they weren't the ones who did the actual killing. Rest of Article. . . [Mark Godsey]